RECRAFTING HISTORY: history, nostalgia & craft in the American memory
curated by Ellen Caldwell
October 29 – December 22, 2011
“Cultural memory is produced through objects, images, and representations. These are technologies of memory, not vessels of memory in which memory passively resides so much as objects through which memories are shared, produced, and given meaning.”
- Marita Sturkin, Tangled Memories
Artists Eric Beltz, Jen Pack, Karen Spector, Frohawk Two-Feathers, and Stephanie Washburn all speak to Sturkin’s concept of a shared history and entangled cultural memory. Exploring our modern world through a recrafted lens, they create fictitious, re-envisioned, nostalgic, and comical memories and renderings of the past and present. Negotiating themes ranging widely in subject and medium, each artist in Recrafting History answers the question, how do we exhibit histories that we don’t talk about? In experiencing their art, we as viewers, are welcomed to explore the deeper themes that trouble the American psyche and collective American memory.
With Eric Beltz’s series of graphite-drawn needlework, Beltz calls the concept of Americana and nostalgia into crisis, by recrafting traditional female work (often considered lowbrow), into male-made High Art (with a capital “A”) for the gallery wall. He appropriates the aesthetic of the craft, but changes the medium and technique, at once reviving and altering the tradition. Additional textual messages tangle and trouble the subject further.
Built of chiffon, thread, and wood, Jen Pack’s Green Bikini and (k)not Entangled use a deconstructed and reconstructed medium to create a dialogue between the viewer and art. Her work, though built from the same materials, takes on a transformative air in the final products’ drastically different forms and functions. And her seemingly disjointed titles are about displacement, and the eternal struggle that comes from deconstructing and reconstructing one’s identity on an ongoing basis.
In Surplus of Light, Karen Spector situates the viewer in an endless video loop that taps into and oscillates from a national post-9/11 fear and insecurity, to a ridiculous feeling of lavishness, abundance, and wealth (found in the extravagant display of fireworks), to a looming uncertainty questioning and undermining American monumentalism and ballsy patriotism. The reversed anthems are a type of siren song, hovering and looming in the soundtrack as both celebratory and foreboding.
With Frohawk Two-Feathers’ latest installment of the saga of the Frenglish Empire, viewers become part of an exchange between cultural memory and history—between the fictitious Frenglish Company Crocodile and our world, with reality being somewhere in the middle. His work focuses mainly on the conflict arising from European colonial conquest, though it is shown predominantly in America, thus forcing American audiences to view this work, and this imperialist retelling, as culturally and historically relevant.
Stephanie Washburn’s Margaret Thatcher’s Garden, offers a sneak-peak into the intimate domestic space of a political body. Through her musings of this imagined realm, we are not just in the midst of a physical interpretation of an exterior location, but are also conceptually in an interior realm of Thatcher herself. Through something as concrete as a garden, we can re-imagine the historical setting for actual political decisions, while also envisioning Thatcher’s internal, private space of contemplation away from the public eye.
Kimberly Brooks: Thread
September 10 – October 22, 2011
Taylor De Cordoba is pleased to present Thread, a solo exhibition of new oil paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Kimberly Brooks. The exhibition will run from September 10 – October 22. The gallery will host an opening reception on Saturday, September 10 from 6pm-8pm.
In her latest body of work, Kimberly Brooks continues to explore portraiture, specifically the complexities of representations of female identities. While in her previous series, including Mom’s Friends (2007) and The Stylist Project (2010), the artist used figures to construct narratives, here the female form is part of a broader abstracted landscape. And while earlier portraits boasted an uncanny likeness to their subjects, Brooks’ style has shifted into something that is simultaneously looser and richer. Facial features have been abstracted and bodies distorted. Fashion and costume, a longtime theme for Brooks, is also deconstructed. Once painstakingly rendered folds and drapes have been reduced to their essential shapes and color fields. In these sumptuous new images, Brooks continues to address questions about how we frame beauty, and the phenomenon of fashion as a both pop culture and artistictouchstone. Taken as a whole, the new paintings create a meta-narrative that contemplates “threads” that define, unite and separate us across different cultures and eras.
Kimberly Brooks’ work has been featured in numerous juried exhibitions organized by curators from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Her work has been featured in myriad publications including the Los Angeles Times, Art Ltd., Daily Serving, The Huffington Post, Vanity Fair, Vogue, among others.
Timothy Hull: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
May 21 – July 9, 2011
hodie adsit, cras absit
-Julius Caesar
Taylor De Cordoba is pleased to present Here Today, Gone Tomorrow, a solo exhibition by New York-based
artist Timothy Hull. The exhibition will run from May 21 through July 9, 2011, with an opening reception for the artist on Saturday May 21 from 6-8pm. This is his third solo show with the gallery.
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow consists of drawings, paintings and wall installations addressing the provisional nature of time and history. Hullʼs new work points to the fact that we exist in an eternal present and that what was, no longer is. In addition, the work explores ideas of representation, reproduction, cultural appropriation and recycling. Hull employs motifs from art history’s distant past as well as from 20th century modernism; mixing and matching patterns, colors and styles that create links through time. The artist connects disparate points in time, such as pop culture imagery from 1980′s cause célèbre to rainforest patterns, Boy George, swatch watches, ruins from antiquity and museum displays as well as renaissance consort music. The artist presents many “doubles” or pairings, some nearly carbon copies of each other, and some similar but different. This is meant as a response to the philosophical questions raised by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas on the nature of being and the essence of things, either real or imagined. The artist employs various artistic mediums, examining concepts such as travel, imperialism, Orientalism, west-meets-east and 1980′s pop imagery. The juxtaposition of discursive imagery and messages from history asks the viewer to consider the factors that led us to this exact moment in time.
Since Timothy Hull’s last exhibition at Taylor de Cordoba his work has been included in group shows in Milan, Italy at La Dictateur Gallery, Rome, Italy at the NOMAS Foundation and in Vienna, Austria at Co-Co. Hull also participated with the group K-48 in the collaborative exhibition “No Soul for Sale” at X-Initiative in New York and the Tate Modern in London. His work has also recently been featured in Flaunt magazine, Dossier Journal, Surface magazine and the New York Times. He has also conducted interviews with other artists for MUSEO magazine, Art in America and the Huffington Post. He recently published a collaborative book of photo-collages with Paul Mpagi Sepuya titled “The Accidental Egyptian and Occidental Arrangements.” He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
FIVE YEAR ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION
April 9 – May 14, 2011
Taylor De Cordoba is pleased to present the 5 Year Anniversary Exhibition, a group show celebrating five years of exhibiting artwork in Culver City. The exhibition will run from April 9 – May 14, 2011, and will kick off with a champagne reception on Saturday, April 9 from 6 – 8pm. To commemorate Taylor De Cordobaʼs first five years and more than thirty past exhibitions, the gallery will feature one new piece by each represented artist, whose visions have shaped the face of the gallery. The selection of artwork will reflect the diversity of artists represented, including:
Sasha Bezzubov
Kimberly Brooks
Kyle Field
Timothy Hull
Charlene Liu
Melissa Manfull
Danielle Nelson Mourning
Chris Natrop
Claire Oswalt
Jeana Sohn
Frohawk Two Feathers
Taylor De Cordoba opened its doors to the public on April 15, 2006. Since then, the gallery has mounted over thirty exhibitions, participated in numerous art fairs, and launched a lauded bi-monthly reading series. Taylor De Cordoba and gallery represented artists have been featured in local and international publications, including: Frieze, Art in America, Artforum, Artweek, Art LTD, V Magazine, Elle, Vanity Fair, W Magazine, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, LA Weekly, Beautiful Decay, C Magazine, Whitewall, The Huffington Post, LA Confidential, Angeleno and more. Los Angeles natives Heather Taylor and Alex de Cordoba co-own the gallery. Taylor De Cordoba is located at 2660 S La Cienega Blvd in Los Angeles, CA and is open to the public Tuesday – Saturday, 11am-6pm. For additional press information, please contact Heather Taylor at heather@taylordecordoba.com or (310) 559-9156.
FROHAWK TWO FEATHERS: Crocodile Company, Part I. La Guerre Des Machettes Danseuses (The War of The Dancing Machetes)
February 19 through March 26, 2011
Taylor De Cordoba is pleased to present Crocodile Company, Part I. La Guerre Des Machettes Danseuses (The War of The Dancing Machetes), a new series of mixed media paintings and drawings by Los Angeles-based artist Frohawk Two Feathers. The exhibition will run from February 19 through March 26, 2011, with an opening reception for the artist on Saturday February 19 from 6-8pm. This is his third solo show with the gallery.
Frohawk Two Feathers continues to demonstrate his skill as a master storyteller, spinning tales of colonialism, imperialism and conquest with his wholly unique iconography. Blending his obsession with the history of conflict and pop culture influences from video games, films and TV shows, the artist tells a wartime narrative starring an imagined cast of fascinating characters. Using two classic traditions of both painting and map making, Two Feathers communicates a tragic, yet often humorous story that, through a slight of hand and bristle of the brush retell and reshape historical roles of race, class, and gender. Originally trained in photography, the artist uses elaborately staged photographs of friends and family as the source material for the final portraits on view.
As with his previous bodies of work, each series functions as a chapter in a never-ending tome. Set in 1789 in the Caribbean, “The War of the Dancing Machetes” is a story of assassination, slavery and the fight for power. Deadly clashes between the black ruling class and “The Crocodile Company” (the newly propertied “mulatto” soldiers), drive this story. While these themes of unrest are familiar in art history, Two Feathers approaches his subjects with a keen eye, creating a unique and memorable visual language. And as a viewer immersed in his storytelling, one cannot help but question whether the specifics come from the artist’s mind or straight from the history books. The artist loosely based this series on the actual “War of Knives” that was fought as a precursor to Haitian independence.
Sasha Bezzubov: Wildfire,
January 8 – February 12, 2011
Taylor De Cordoba is pleased to present Wildfire, the galleryʼs third exhibition by Brooklyn-based photographer Sasha Bezzubov. The exhibition will run from January 8th through February 12th, 2011. The gallery will host an opening reception for the artist on Saturday January 8th from 6pm-8pm.
This exhibition consists of nine large-format color photographs that document the aftermath of wildfires in California between 2003 to 2007, including those at Running Springs, San Diego County and Cedar Glen. Bezzubov creates powerful images of mundane places that have been instantly transformed through the violent power of a natural force, into dreamscapes of apocalyptic proportions. The artist shows us the moments just after disaster strikes: a bare hillside with one precariously perched charred car; a spiral staircase jutting into the landscape surrounded by rubble of the home that once encased it; and eerily empty forests scattered with seemingly never ending rows of blackened trees. While these images evoke a post-apocalyptic sense of dread, there is something jarring in their quiet beauty.
With the photographsʼ muted, dusty palette and empty spaces, viewers often recall images of the “wild west” and the desert landscape of pre-development California. Russian born Sasha Bezzubov writes in his project statement that Wildfire “pays tribute to those earlier photographs, but also brings them and the landscape they helped to fashion into question.”Here, the artist presents a view that could be taken from a past period in history, just as easily as it could exist in a dystopic future. Yet, there is something undeniably calm about these images that are nearly devoid of any evidence of man and industrialization. Standing before these epic works, one canʼt help but reflect on how little control we actually possess when confronted with the unstoppable forces of nature.
Sasha Bezzubov is the recipient of numerous awards and grants for his photographic works, including two Fulbright Scholarship Awards for his work in Vietnam and India. He earned his MFA from Yale University in 1997. His work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire Magazine, Newsweek, Details Magazine, The Village Voice and Blind Spot.